Game:

Play Being a Bus in a separate tab or window.

In a few sentences, describe how you felt after playing.

Activity:

What do you think of when you think of the word “bus?”

Together, let’s draw individually what we think of as a “bus.”

Bus, Explained

A bus is a connection + some materiality.

In a digital setting, a bus works in concert with a driver. A bus is, in a sense, “driven” by some software that knows when to pick data or power up, where to drop it off, and what to do while carrying it.

A bus is a description of the constraints placed on the connection between nodes.

In a network, there might be a bandwidth limit between nodes. A certain amount of data might only be able to be sent at a certain time or as part of some batch. The bus is the manner through which data is exchanged and moved. It is both the means and the director of that data.

References:

“How does a computer’s parallel port work?” 1 April 2000. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question11.htm> 18 January 2016

HowStuffWorks.com Contributors “What is the main difference between FireWire and USB?” 27 July 2011. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/difference-between-firewire-usb.htm> 18 January 2016

HowStuffWorks.com Contributors “What’s another name for FireWire?” 27 July 2011.
HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/whats-another-name-firewire.htm> 18 January 2016

Tracy V. Wilson “How PCI Express Works” 17 August 2005. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/pci-express.htm> 18 January 2016

Jeff Tyson & Tracy V. Wilson “How SCSI Works” 18 May 2001. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/scsi.htm> 18 January 2016

Ha. Poor How Stuff Works. While obviously a source for information about, well, “how stuff works,” it also seems to have let just about anyone with any degree of knowledge about a certain aspect or piece of technology write their entries of roughly any length they want. All very well and good, you know, if you want a quick write-up for cousin Susie to know “How does a parallel port work?” and all, but not really an expert on the subject by any means. Merely, as the author line lists, a “contributor” to the knowledgebase of the site.

In terms of “buses,” if I were to define it as a computer scientist, I would list it as “a data exchange interface.” In much the same way that it it might be “highways that take information and power from one place to another” as define by How Stuff Works, it’s also not strictly “information” in the interpretational sense (Tyson & Wilson, 2016). Data is by far the better term for defining how units are moved around. Information is interpreted from an internal or external context. It is understand by some entries within a symbolic context. Data just is. It’s merely moving things around within a setting like a computer that is utterly and completely devoid of meaning.

Computers have no symbolic interpretation linguistic ability. They exchange binary power signals that are moved across a pipeline from one place to another. “Power,” as listed by How Stuff Works, however, might be right as, in a computational sense, “power” and “data” are the same thing. A computer both runs on power and exchanges it among its buses in a way that moves from one internal part to another. Within a computer, there is often a central bus and those running off of it. These can be thought of as both the circular system and the nervous system, in a biological context.

For the metaphor of a circular system, power is routed through a computer via the central bus around the computer from the power supply to each part in turn. The motherboard controls the bus, routing things through its own controls and stepping up or down the power as needed. Unlike the circular system in a body, however, there is no “waste” to remove from the system. Within a computer, power is all. It is connected to everything. In order for all parts to receive power, they need to be connected to everything else within a path.

To detect things, like in a nervous system, a computer must “scan” for things at regular internal. However, unlike a body reporting on what might be pressing on the skin, a computer detects things along the bus by measuring the power levels along its ports. Just like blood pressure changes as blood leaves the body, so does a computer “scan” that something has happened and that it needs to then read information. When the power levels change, the computer tries to adapt to the change through passing along whatever it found by way of data exchange to software that reacts if the device is known and its interface open.

Often, the software that sits between a port and even “drives the bus,” so to speak, is just that: a driver. As a small piece of code, a “driver” might be thought of as a series of if-then statements with a handful of functionality thrown in depending on the device. For the most part, the driver acts in the same manner as that of a “bus driver” might: given certain conditions, it knowns when to let things on and off the bus, when to stop, and then to go again. For the bus, the driver is invisible. It is the software that “runs” the hardware that directs the bus to do things. Just as the brain and body is inseparable, the bus and its “driver” act on one another and move the body as certain external and internal actions happen.

In relation to a network, a bus might be thought of a connection made manifest. It is the materiality of the movements between nodes. While, in an abstract sense, there might be a link between nodes, the use of the word “bus” implies some constraints toward the situational context. In much the same way that we read about the construction of a rhetorical situation, a bus might be thought of as the constraints through which data is exchanged. Be it a bandwidth, length, or even speed, a “bus” is the part that joins the abstract to the built, the bridge between the standardization and something substantial.